Author N.K. Jemisin, whose novel The Fifth Season won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Daniel Visse/Wikimedia Commons

Saturday night’s 2016 Hugo Awards ceremony was once again the site of a proxy battle between a group of activists led by white nationalist and misogynist Theodore Beale and his followers and, well, the rest of the world. The Hugo Awards, which honor excellence in science fiction and fantasy, are awarded annually at the World Science Fiction Convention; in 2015, as Katy Waldman reported for Slate, two groups of right-wing science fiction fans gamed the awards-nominating process. One was known as the Sad Puppies, fans who ostensibly wanted more representation of classic space-opera science fiction (but in practice spent a lot of time complaining about storiesthataddressedsocialissues); the other was the Rabid Puppies, led by Beale, whose stated mission was completely unrelated to science fiction but rather “to destroy [Social Justice Warriors] and SJW ideology.”

Beale, who turned 48 on Sunday, is a grown man who refers to himself as “Vox Day” and “Supreme Dark Lord,” wrote in 2005 that he considers “women’s rights to be a disease that should be eradicated” and celebrated his birthday this year by proclaiming the United States a “white nation” on Twitter:

What the virtue-signalers call "racist" is what was once known as "America". America was, and is, a white nation. pic.twitter.com/716EPh4G9w

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Even in categories where one of Beale’s choices won, the winners went out of their way to reject his views—as io9 reports, Neil Gaiman, who shared the award for Best Graphic Story with J.H. Williams III for The Sandman: Overture, said the following in the written acceptance speech he sent in lieu of attending:

It meant a lot to see Sandman: Overture nominated for a Hugo Award, and was disappointing to see that it had been dragged into the unfortunate mess that the pitiable people who call themselves Puppy had attempted to inflict on Worldcon and its awards. I would have withdrawn it from consideration, but even that seemed like it would have been giving these sad losers too much acknowledgement.